Tag: media

In the SF world rages a war

A translation of the article on Castalia House in Finland’s largest newspaper.

IN THE SCI-FI WORLD OF USA RAGES A WAR, IN WHICH EVEN THE GAME OF THRONES AUTHOR IS ENTANGLED WITH – AND IN THE EPICENTER OF IT ALL IS THIS KOUVOLA MAN

Sci-fi literature enthusiasts in USA are in civil war. A conservative mutiny is trying to push out of bestseller lists and awards the mainstream, “tolerant” sci-fi. The battle is already being called culture wars – and one of the headquarters is located in Finland.

There is a man in Kouvola, and before the man, a computer.

Together, the man and the computer are in the front lines of a battle that is shaking the entire world of sci-fi literature.

The man and the computer were revealed to the world, spring this year.

At the time was published “the Oscars of sci-fi books” – Hugo-awards – nominees.

The entire sci-fi world roared: lists were full of works by religious extremists and ultraconservatives.

The surprise was so big that even The New York Times and Washington Post wrote about it.

And behind the entire surprise were a man and a computer in Kouvola.

The name of the man is Markku Koponen, and on the computer runs a company called Castalia House.

Koponen publishes conservative science fiction to everywhere in the world, mainly as e-books to the web store Amazon.

Who on earth is this man?`

“I suppose you could even call me ultraconservative”, Koponen says on the phone.

At least judging by his authors, the characterization rings true. On Koponen’s list are, among others, the authors at the center of the Hugo-brouhaha, John C. Wright and pen name Vox Day, who is Theodore Beale.

Both men are known for their extreme opinions: Wright’s comments have been characterized as anti-gay, and Beale’s racist and misogynist.

Koponen tells he has founded Castalia House due to having been fed up with contemporary science fiction.

He thought it too left wing, too tolerant and full of the preaching of such things – “message fiction”.

Koponen has never been much involved with Finland’s sci-fi scene. He has been in contact with them to the degree of breaking fellowship.

According to Koponen his name and address were mentioned in a sci-fi enthusiast mailing list – at which point he wrote to the members a response saying he indeed is in an opposite corner with them, and will walk his own path with his publishing house, apart from them.

So, in Finland Koponen is alone, but in the world out there he is part of an entire army.

In the sci-fi and fantasy circles – fandom – in USA there is a controversy which is already being called a culture war.

Outside the mainstream of sci-fi there is a conservative cabal resisting the majority of fandom, which has assumed the name Sad Puppies. In spirit, Koponen is part of this group.

According to Sad Puppies, over-tolerating forces keep the entire fandom in their grip so tightly, that authors and fans who support conservative values are shut out of the circles.

This irritates Sad Puppies, who consider proper sci-fi and fantasy to be in the same vein as in, for example, the forties and fifties.

Such “proper sci-fi” is one where heroes are manly, white hetero men, women are victims to be rescued and enemies are disgusting aliens.

Black and white settings are not confused with deep moral considerations, and most assuredly not with leftist or feminist thoughts.

Koponen thinks fandom and mainstream sci-fi publishing is riddled, both in Finland and elsewhere in the world, a “tolerant consensus”. This leads to censorship of “proper sci-fi” and the dominance of preachy message fiction.

“They are quite like-minded folks. And it’s no conspiracy really, likeminded people simply easily flock together”, Koponen says.

“A common climate of opinion emerges naturally: just the way it happens on our side too.”

Examples of this “real sci-fi” that Koponen admires, were written in past decades for example by such authors as John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein.

Many of their works are considered sci-fi classics these days, but also products of their era. For example, Campbell’s views are, according to modern standards, thoroughly racist and conservative.
Nowadays “traditional” sci-fi or fantasy is represented by such people as the American author Larry Correia and Brad R. Torgersen. Correia rose even to the New York Times best seller list with his Monster Hunter -series, but in his own opinion he has been discriminated against among fandom for his views.

Behind the entire rebellion, in a sense, is actually Correia.

You see, two years ago he started an internet campaign for his own Hugo-nomination.

In it, he blamed the usual Hugo-voters as arrogant elitists, who only value left-wing messagefiction and turn their noses at Correia’s Pulp-style entertainment books.

He amped up his appeal ironically with a picture of a sad dog puppy, from which the Sad Puppies name was born. Then along came Torgersen, the campaign got bigger, and the duo started putting together their slates on not just their own books, but others – all of them naturally works that they’d consider discriminated against by fandom elite.

Eventually Vox Day aka. Theodore Beale came to stir the soup.

Beale was an influential figure in the techno band Psykosonik, and video game company Fenris Wolf. At the beginning of 2000’s Beale started his writing career with his strongly religious War in Heaven -fantasy book and has since released dozens of works.

Beale has written, among other things, how women’s suffrage should be ended and called an African-American woman who criticized him a “half-savage”.

The radical Sad Puppies movement got even more radical Rabid Puppies -slate.

And then, in the Hugo-vote of this spring, the conservative sci-fi -people’s project brought returns. In nearly every category there was Sad- and Rabid Puppies’ favorites, and a central publisher among them was Koponen’s Castalia House.

There was an uproar.

Several Hugo-nominated authors gave up their nomination and well-known sci-fi and fantasy authors expressed their disappointment towards what happened. Among the latter were, for example, the Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin, who opined that the rightist sci-fi -wing has destroyed the entire award. In his blog Martin ended up in a long debate with Larry Correia.

Many sci-fi fans expressed their protest by intending to vote, instead of the official nominees, “Noah Ward”. This is not a person, but a pun on “no award”.

Most of all, the roar happened in Finland: What on earth was the Finnish publishing house amidst it all, of which nearly no-one knew anything?

Until last year, Markku Koponen was quite the ordinary engineer.

He graduated from Tampere University of Technology and programmed code for industrial use. Koponen was writing actively on politics in the internet: he calls himself a social conservative. He also read lots of sci-fi.

Koponen became acquainted with Theodore Beale in the Internet, some years ago, when the ideologies of the two men “clicked”. As a result came mutual projects, latest of them being Castalia House.

In the partnership, Beale is the foaming-at-the-mouth spokesman, and Koponen handles the business in the background, and constructs technical architechtures. Koponen might be described as the weaponsmith of Sad Puppies, of a sort.

He says he is in agreement with Beale on the “general lines”, although there are some doctrinal disagreements on the matters of faith.

Koponen describes himself as a fundamentalist Christian, in the sense of agreeing with the document The Five Fundamentals, published by the American Presbyterian Church in 1910 about the mandatory, non-negotiable content of the Christian faith.

In any event, Koponen is in line with the Sad Puppies movement.

Foundational to Castalia House according to Koponen is to give a guarantee to the authors that their religious or political views will not be censored.

For example, John C. Wright, whom Koponen describes as a devoted Catholic, will be allowed to include his ideology in his books as much as he damn well pleases, and Castalia House will publish.

“With this promise it has been really easy to get authors onboard. Many are fed up with their books being censored for ideological content with quite the heavy hand.”

However, Koponen has not been involved in the Sad Puppies -campaigning, social media arguments nor otherwise – except by publishing books that the activists will enjoy.

He says that he would not have founded Castalia House either, had he not very early on realized the commercial potential in the conservative sci-fi, so loved by Sad Puppies.

This has also proven true: Koponen says he has only invested his own money the necessary 2 500 EUR required to start a Limited Liability Company, and now the firm produces a gross profit of about 30 000 EUR already.

Castalia House mostly sells e-books. According to Koponen, in good months a few thousand books get sold. Physical books get sold only some hundreds of units a month.

Castalia Housen books have been translated to other languages than English, among them Finnish, but Koponen says 99 percent of the market is currently in the United States.

To Finland, the Sad Puppies -movement and culture war – Koponen agrees with this word – has not spread yet in a large degree.

But it will in a few years, he believes.

“At least, if Worldcon is held in Finland in 2017, I expect some sort of a clash here too”

Indeed, the mainstream sci-fi circles in Finland are active, and are attempting to get the largest event of the sci-fi world to Finland: Worldcon. The annual, controversial Hugo-awards are handed out in it.

Finnish fandom has raised its flag for equality. Also in the “Worldcon to Helsinki” -project, this flag for open-mindedness is very visible – and it’s a flag against Sad Puppies’ values.

The chairman of the science fiction society in Helsinki who has been active in Finnish fandom for decades, is the reporter and author Vesa Sisättö. He doesn’t believe that the upheaval comes here.

Sisättö opines that in the American fandom, the debate that happened in Finland already in 1980’s is happening now.

“At the time there was a minor brawl in the fan circles when Johanna Sinisalo came and spoke on behalf of the status of women in Sci-fi. The contrarians came silent pretty fast, and in the nineties it was not an issue any longer.”

Sisättö considers Sad Puppies a backlash to the fact that old, traditional values no longer hold – quite the same phenomenon as with the Finns Party in Finnish politics, Sisättö mulls.

“What was mainstream in the past, is now minority. Culture changes, and when it happens, certain fellows wake up to it and start raising a ruckus.”

He doesn’t believe the movement is viable in the long run.

“The most active Sad Puppy -buzzers run out of steam, the followers get tired too, and eventually we reach a “is this worth the fight any more?” -phase.

Nor does the conservative Koponen wish to eradicate the mainstream sci-fi, but rather wants to raise his own genre to parity with it.

“At that point, we can live in as much peace as is possible.”

Also worthy of note is that in the spring, another Finnish Hugo-news turned up: First time ever, a Finnish candidate is on the shortlist: The illustrator Ninni Aalto, who competes in the best fan artist -category.

That category has no Sad Puppy nominees.

David Brooks discovers SJWs

And, unsurprisingly, he likes what he sees. He just thinks they take their “noble impulses” a little too far:

Every generation has an opportunity to change the world. Right now, college campuses around the country are home to a moral movement that seeks to reverse centuries of historic wrongs.

This movement is led by students forced to live with the legacy of sexism, with the threat, and sometimes the experience, of sexual assault. It is led by students whose lives have been marred by racism and bigotry. It is led by people who want to secure equal rights for gays, lesbians and other historically marginalized groups.

These students are driven by noble impulses to do justice and identify oppression. They want to not only crack down on exploitation and discrimination, but also eradicate the cultural environment that tolerates these things. They want to police social norms so that hurtful comments are no longer tolerated and so that real bigotry is given no tacit support. Of course, at some level, they are right. Callous statements in the mainstream can lead to hostile behavior on the edge. That’s why we don’t tolerate Holocaust denial….

The problem is that the campus activists have moral fervor, but don’t always have settled philosophies to restrain the fervor of their emotions. Settled philosophies are meant to (but obviously don’t always) instill a limiting sense of humility, a deference to the complexity and multifaceted nature of reality. But many of today’s activists are forced to rely on a relatively simple social theory.

According to this theory, the dividing lines between good and evil are starkly clear. The essential conflict is between the traumatized purity of the victim and the verbal violence of the oppressor. According to this theory, the ultimate source of authority is not some hard-to-understand truth. It is everybody’s personal feelings.

No. Their impulses are not noble. They are not right on any level. They have no right to police anything. Their eternal argumentum ad sensum is an intrinsically false and dangerous philosophy. They and their totalitarian ideology are what need to be eradicated.

SJW is solipsistic totalitarianism. SJW is the real bigotry of the mind. SJW delenda est.

The end of National Review

I quit reading National Review when they canned John Derbyshire for the crime of telling the truth about race. Now that it has come out out of the marital closet, I expect considerably more people on the Right to follow suit. It is readily apparent that the difference between the liberal media and the so-called conservative media is about 20 years. And, like all homogamists, he openly lies about the way in which it utterly destroys the institution of marriage:

Finally, a word on the oft-heard claim that if we recognize same-sex marriages we’ll also have to marry siblings, and groups of a hundred and three, and adults to children, and humans to invertebrates, and so on.

Members of group relationships, whatever we may think of them, manifestly have not made the same kind of choice as have those in exclusive commitments, and so there is no equal-treatment basis for their inclusion in marriage. Remember, the equal-treatment argument we outlined above does not assert that marriage is about any kind of romantic love. It asserts that marriage is about a particular form of such love — faithfulness and exclusivity subsequent to a vow of permanent commitment — that is already partially included under traditional marriage laws. (Let us note in passing the ridiculousness of speaking of an “orientation to polygamy,” as traditionalists sometimes do, unless this means trivially that anyone might feel more than one attraction at a time, in which case we are presumably all so oriented.)

There is a sense in which the other types of relationships traditionalists scare us with, even if they were exclusive, would also not involve the same kind of choice as does a romantic commitment of two unrelated adults: They would fall short, for one or both parties, of being chosen in full freedom. In the case of family members, for example, an irrevocable and unchosen bond between the two already exists, and in that sense they cannot really give themselves to each other. That is why we see incest as a perversion of a preexisting relationship. As for a child, it does not possess a sufficiently developed mind and will with which to give consent to a sexual relationship. That is why we think such a relationship is exploitative. The specific ways in which these relationships fall short of full freedom — along with the unique intensity of sexual intimacy — in turn explain the primary harms that they intrinsically risk causing (for example, by undermining impartiality and stability within families, or by psychologically damaging children).

In any case, if you want to account for the special opprobrium we reserve for such things, you will have to offer some explanation of what is specifically wrong with them.

It’s bitterly amusing to see how a nation-in-decline congratulates itself with every step it descends into Hell and the inevitable dustbin of history. But those who refuse to learn from history are usually destined to repeat its more unpleasant lessons. Or rather, their children and grandchildren are.

SCIENCE is not science

Whatever happened to the idea that science is self-correcting?

Over the past few days a scandal has begun to plague political science. A UCLA graduate student, Michael LaCour, appears to have faked a data set that was the basis for an article that he published in the highly prestigious journal Science. I have examined a second paper by LaCour. As I’ll explain, I’m convinced that it also is the product of faked results.

The Science article purportedly showed that personalized, door-to-door canvassing is effective at changing political views. LaCour and his co-author, Don Green of Columbia University, enlisted members of an LGBT organization at UCLA to contact voters who had earlier indicated on a survey that they opposed gay marriage. The article shows, based on follow-up surveys, that the LGBT door-to-door canvassing had a significant effect in shifting voters toward pro-gay-marriage views.

Two graduate students at UC Berkeley, however, had significant difficulties in replicating the study. They called the private firm that LaCour had supposedly enlisted to conduct his survey. The firm, however, said that it did not conduct such a survey. LaCour had also reported to the grad students the name of an employee of the survey firm with whom he worked. The firm, however, said that it had no records of such an employee ever working at the firm.

After confronting his coauthor, Green requested that Science retract the article. LaCour still stands by his results. Science, faced with this dilemma, has not (yet) retracted the paper.

That pretty much settles the question of whether Science concerns scientody – the scientific method – or scientistry – the scientific profession. An “editorial expression of concern” is not sufficient. The study could not be replicated and there is evidence that the first study was not legitimate. Therefore, a reputable publication that was actually dedicated to scientody would retract the study immediately pending further evidence of its replicability. Science is observably not such a publication.

Especially when the man who developed the method that researcher utilized has come out very strongly against the legitimacy of LaCour’s work:

I think the bulk of the evidence suggests that LaCour faked at least some of the results of this second paper. Not only would I be willing to bet on this conclusion, I would be willing to give 10:1 odds on it. Still, I’m not certain, and I would be hesitant to give 100:1 odds. And I would refuse to give 1,000:1 odds.

Regardless, I am certain that LaCour faked the results of the original paper—the one published in Science. I predict that UCLA will refuse to award him a PhD, and I predict that Princeton will retract the assistant professorship that it offered him. I predict that UCLA or Princeton or both will conduct an investigation. I suspect that they will find that LaCour faked results in a few papers, not just one.

But the most damning thing, as far as the credibility of Science goes, is this observation, “It is very rare for political scientists to have our results mentioned alongside results from the “hard” sciences.” So why, then, was this apparently fraudulent paper selected for such unusual publication in the first place?

Good riddance

The death of the print media in America. It’s pretty astonishing, but having grown up reading the Star Tribune, aka “the Red Star”, it’s good to see them collapsing in such a dramatic manner. At this rate, many of them should be gone altogether by 2023.

And it is a very healthy sign, I think, for a one-way monopolistic medium to be replaced by a two-way medium with literally thousands of options. I expect the conventional publishing world to follow suit in reasonably short order once Barnes & Noble goes out of business.

The SJWs are losing

So are their allies in the media:

If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then these people went out of their way to prove that social justice is the last refuge of bullies and cowards.

But real life is not high school, and now the worm has turned. Like clockwork, nearly every alleged “victim” put forward with oozing crocodile tears by these journalistic reptiles has been discredited. Their narrative that sexism dominates Silicon Valley has been crushed under a judge’s gavel. Their claim that depraved captains of tech exploit rape culture to ravish the vulnerable appear to have been exposed as rank opportunism at best. Their allegations that rape has swept America’s college campuses now look like the fabrications of pathological liars and jealous exes. The allegedly “sexist” and “violent” #Gamergate has braved a bomb threat without incident, while its media critics have either been fired, lost millions of dollars for alienating their core audience, or have simply revealed their extremism too publicly to be taken seriously. An army of science fiction fans determined to see merit returned to the criteria used for awarding the prestigious Hugo Awards have stormed the leftist bastille that is Worldcon and reduced their opponents to (ironically) suddenly discovering that an uncritically “inclusive” space might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

And if that wasn’t enough, this week, the Society of Professional Journalists has agreed to hear the case made by #Gamergate supporters that the entire field of gaming journalism has been turned into a hotbed of cronyism and ideologically motivated deceit. This mark of legitimacy was sensibly conferred after a particularly conscientious member of the SPJ quite reasonably pointed out that an accusation of unethical behavior deserves a hearing, no matter how unfashionable its exponents.

This didn’t start overnight. It won’t end overnight. But we’re winning our Lexington and Concord.

The media litmus tests

A New York Times reporter fact-checks ethnic identity:

A Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, David McCleary, wrote to me this week with a complaint about being subjected to what he called “a Jewish litmus test” during a Times interview.

The interview (conducted by a Times stringer, or regular freelancer, who is not on the full-time staff) was done for an article that eventually appeared on the front page, “Campus Debates on Israel Drive a Wedge Between Jews and Minorities.” It took up efforts on college campuses to pressure Israel over its policies toward Palestinians and its occupation of the West Bank.

Mr. McCleary, who is Jewish, said that the reporter, Ronnie Cohen, asked him “insulting and demeaning questions,” including whether he “looked Jewish,” after telling him that his name didn’t sound Jewish and asking if he had been bar mitzvahed. He also said that after talking with the reporter for more than an hour, he was displeased to find that none of that interview made its way into the article, and that no other Jewish student who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was quoted or represented in the story….

After speaking to Ms. Cohen, who confirmed, in general terms, the nature
of the questions to Mr. McCleary, Ms. Mitchell told me, “If she indeed
pursued that line of questioning, it was inappropriate.”

These litmus tests are the way SJWs in the media and elsewhere attempt to shoehorn people into their anti-white narrative. You’ve probably noticed that they absolutely hate to admit that I am a Native American, because that blows their “white supremacist” angle to Hell. You can tell they don’t really care about Hispanics because they have no similar problem admitting that I am Mexican… except for the few who were trying to raciss-DISQUALIFY on the basis of my statements against open immigration.

In the case of the intrepid Ms Cohen, it’s obvious that she didn’t like the fact that a Jewish man was taking what she believed to be the wrong position, ergo she tried to DISQUALIFY him as a Jew. This is one of the many inevitable consequences of identity-based ideology. As one professor objected:

I am distressed about the lack of evidence in the piece to support the authors’ assertions about this deeply sensitive and volatile issue. Divestment is supported by a large group of individuals — some of them members of minority groups, and some Jews. (I, incidentally, do not support the movement). To make this into a “Minority vs. Jewish” question, without supplying evidence, is to distort the issue.

Of course, distorting the issue is the main objective. But this story of ethics in ethnic journalism also points to something more important. When talking to the media, ALWAYS record them. It’s clear that the national editor doesn’t want to fire Ms Cohen, hence the statement “If she indeed
pursued that line of questioning”. Since Mr. McCleary probably didn’t record his conversation with the reporter, he probably can’t prove it and she’ll get away with it.

So, I repeat: when speaking with the media, ALWAYS record your conversation. This prevents them from playing their usual game of attempting to spin what you said even as they deny what they did and said.

Men don’t matter to SJWs

Nero observes the uneven and sexist reaction to acts of violence in A GAME OF THRONES:

    D&D are trash bags go back to the sewerage where you belong
    — ziggy (@foxfeuer) May 18, 2015

    D&D are so gross I hope they burn in hell.
    — stevebucky asun (@mybaabyblue) May 18, 2015

    I AM FUCKING FURIOUS I WANT D&D TO DIE THOSE PIECES OF SHIT
    — JUSTICE FOR SANSA (@sansaslady) May 18, 2015

“D&D” refers to the show’s creators, Daniel Benioff and Daniel Weiss.

If any other group were caught making tweets like this, they would probably be labelled a hate group. But that can’t happen to feminists, so publications like Vox instead blamed the show’s creators for “provoking the ire of the internet”. It’s hardly surprising, of course. These are the same people who had nothing to say about #killallmen.

This isn’t the first time that violence against female characters in Game of Thrones has attracted attention. The first was over the graphic murder of a prostitute by the sadistic King Joffrey. Then people were upset when Robb Stark’s pregnant wife was stabbed in the belly. Robb himself was impaled with a sword before his corpse was decapitated and paraded around with a wolf’s head stuck on his neck, but no one minded so much about that.

But the latest outrage has surpassed all the others, with odious, risible “geek feminist” blog The Mary Sue announcing that they would no longer promote the series.

    Here’s our new policy re: @GameOfThrones. http://t.co/OkqrSawZaI #GameOfThrones

    — The Mary Sue (@TheMarySue) May 19, 2015

If these aggrieved Tumblrinas took a minute to think, they might figure out why violence against female characters seems so shocking: it’s because on-screen violence against men is so common that it doesn’t surprise us, and that in turn makes on-screen violence against women stand out.

It’s no different in games. Remember all the protests against GTA because you COULD kill prostitutes in a game where you MUST kill copious men in a broad variety of ways just in order to play. Meanwhile, an SJW-approved version of A GAME OF THRONES is suggested:

Daenerys Targaryean withdraws from marrying Khal Drogo after realizing she’s a strong independent Khaleesi that don’t need no Dothraki. Daenrys still takes the dragon eggs that were a wedding gift. As she never burns though the eggs never hatch.

Sansa cuts her long red hair short and dyes it rainbow colours. Starts a social media raven campaign for the awareness of how tough the daughters of Lords have it. Spends the rest of her time telling peasant boys to check their privilege.

I’ve previously pointed out how the basic story of A GAME OF THRONES isn’t even possible if the author had been properly feminist, and how a single change to a single character in A Song of Ice and Fire
would have eviscerated the entire series and eliminated the
greater part of its plot.  Consider the consequences of changing Cersei
Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father
to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently
ubiquitous in third-generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal
fiction.

  1. Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  2. House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  3. Cersei’s children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  4. Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  5. Robert doesn’t have a hunting accident arranged by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  6. Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  7. The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s
    Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to
    Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and
    learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly
becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son
and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys
Targaryen.

“the most despised man in science fiction”

Despised, feared, it’s pretty much all the same, isn’t it? The Wall Street Journal takes note of the Hugo Awards, with an article entitled “The Culture Wars Invade Science Fiction Online campaigners are pushing to give SF’s annual Hugo Awards to popular space yarns, not more literary fiction or tales of diversity”. It’s not entirely negative despite the reporter feeling the need to get the opinion of two writers, John Scalzi and George Martin, who don’t know a damn thing about what the Puppies are doing. But regardless, the main thing is that the reporter correctly grasped that this is a new front in the cultural war and not a self-serving attempt to pick up meaningless trophies.

Theodore Beale had a big day when the nominations for science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards were announced last month: He received two nominations for his editing work, and nine stories and books from Castalia House, the tiny publisher where he is lead editor, won nominations.

Quite a feat, since Mr. Beale—better known in the science-fiction world by his pen name, Vox Day—is probably now the most despised man in science fiction. In 2013, he was expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America after he used the group’s Twitter feed to link to his criticisms of a black female writer as an “ignorant half-savage.” He has called women’s rights “a disease” and homosexuality a “birth defect.”

So why are he and the Castalia House authors being honored? Because two online campaigns by self-styled conservatives, one led by Mr. Beale, flooded the Hugo ballot box

The two groups—which call themselves the “Sad Puppies” and the “Rabid Puppies”—urged the science-fiction fans who vote for the awards to nominate slates of books and authors that the Puppies say have been ignored by the Hugos. The Puppies’ supporters contend that the awards are clique-ridden and biased, rewarding liberal perspectives and self-consciously “literary” fiction rather than traditional, popular tales of space battles and fantasy quests.

The Puppies succeeded wildly…. “This is an important symbol in one particular area of the culture war, and so we took it away from the other side,” said Mr. Beale, who headed the “Rabid Puppies” campaign.

Let them hear us howl… and be afraid. Next stop, Fox News. I thought it was about as balanced an article as one can reasonably expect from the mainstream media, but I did send the reporter the following corrections.

  1. I wasn’t expelled
    from SFWA. The SFWA Board voted unanimously to expel me, but the
    membership never voted as required by the bylaws and Massachusetts
    state law. Note that SFWA has never stated that I was expelled, for the obvious
    reason that I was not. 
  2. The feed concerned
    isn’t the group’s Twitter feed, which is @SFWA, but an unofficial feed called @SFWAauthors.
  3. “probably”? Come on, who else is there?

Of course, I’m not a conservative either, nor are many of you, but in my opinion, that’s within the reasonable margin of error. We’re certainly “conservative” in comparison with the SJW freaks in science fiction. All that really matters is that he got the cultural war aspect right.

As for the black hat, I don’t mind it at all. Let’s face it, I look pretty damn good in black. Let them open up their hate and let it flow into me.